‘A dark undercurrent in the film reflects the man himself’ … images from Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F Percy Smith.
Composite: BFI

Mould spreads like a firework. A bee suckles at a sweet pea bloom like a baby on a breast. Runner bean shoots sway and twirl as gracefully as dancers. It is difficult to put into words the alien strangeness of the microscopic worlds depicted by the pioneering film-maker F Percy Smith. Self-taught and working before and after the first world war, Smith mastered early microscopic, time-lapse and underwater photography with contraptions he fashioned from Meccano, candle wicks and gramophone needles.

Secrets of nature

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Stuart Staples, the lead singer and creative force behind the indie band Tindersticks, was so entranced by Smith’s work that he made a film. Minute Bodies is a beautiful, hypnotic melange of the amazing footage Smith captured at his suburban home on the edge of London. Rather than interpret the pictures with voiceover or subtitles, Staples and film editor David Reeve have intricately matched the images with an instrumental score, which is sometimes soothing and often sinister.

Staples became obsessed after chancing upon a BBC4 documentary about an acrobatic fly with which Smith first stunned cinemagoers in 1908. “I just started this little journey and ended up in the basement of the BFI with reels of film nobody has seen for years,” Staples says. The images inspired him to make music. “They’re so musical. If someone wants to make a biopic of Smith, I think it would be really interesting. But this film is something else – it’s to do with his work and his fascination.”

Staples realised his compositions could help liberate Smith’s images.“I felt their beauty and adventure to be somehow trapped in their time and format,” he says. So he stripped them of them of their jaunty, RP voiceovers. “Percy Smith’s work had to be dressed in a certain way in 1925, but now the affectations stop us appreciating it. I hope that people will look and say, ‘That’s really something.’”

The world now sacrifices everything to speed. Quiet is regarded as a detestable condition to be expurgated by any means

Percy Smith

Staples, who lives in France, collaborated on the score with musicians including the percussionist Thomas Belhom and pianist Christine Ott, who also plays the ondes martenot, an early electronic musical instrument invented in 1928 – fitting the period when Smith made his films. Smith killed himself in 1945. “There is a dark section of the music, and an undercurrent in the film that reflects the man himself,” Staples says.

Monochrome magic … F Percy Smith at work in 1945, shortly before his death. Photograph: ANL/Rex/Shutterstock

The film-maker didn’t want to muddle together random images but to keep the “integrity” of some of Smith’s narratives about everything from sweet peas to tadpoles. “It caused us problems, because the film became too episodic at one point. We had a pool of great moments, but that doesn’t necessarily make for a great experience for an hour.” So he brought in film editor David Reeve to knit these moments into a whole.

‘Percy never had an inkling that his work might be viewed as art’ … Stuart Staples. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Trawling the BFI archives together, they chanced upon Smith’s film of newts under water, which they found to be his most striking footage. “The newt film always makes me stop,” says Reeve. “I can’t believe what he was able to capture with the lenses available then.” Staples laughs. “It’s been a labour of love for me and David, and I’ve worked on it for a long time. We tried lots of experiments with voiceovers and captions and ways to talk about Percy more, but ultimately we cut all those things away and kept a dreamscape.”

“The world now sacrifices everything to speed,” Percy Smith said. “Quiet seems to be regarded as a detestable condition to be expurgated by any means which applied science can devise.” The naturalist argued that this “state of affairs” does not produce many people who desire to explore “the hidden beauties of nature”. This quiet visionary’s words and work seem increasingly pertinent today. Smith’s Secrets of Nature films have been reissued by the BFI and he’s been hailed by contemporary nature writers including Tim Dee and Robert Macfarlane. Tindersticks will perform the Minute Bodies’ score live next year at a series of “cine-events” and Staples is in discussions with several galleries for the film to become an installation.

“I love the fact that Percy would never have had an inkling that his work might be viewed as art,” Staples says. “Hopefully, people will see the film and come away with a sense of this man’s commitment to his work and his voyage of discovery. I just hope it gives him the recognition that he deserves.”

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